Suffering Nude

In the autumn of 1907 the Salon d'Automne in Paris gave Cézanne, who had died the year before, a memorial retrospective, and the young painters in the city went through it again and again. Modigliani, who had come up from Livorno the previous year, was one of them, and he is said to have carried a reproduction of Cézanne's Boy in a Red Waistcoat in his pocket. This nude dates from the year after that show and sits in the narrow grey-blue range he was painting in then. Very little survives from his first Paris years. Within a year or two he had largely put painting down and spent about five years carving heads in stone, which was the work he wanted to be judged by.